Harold Meyerson

Recent Articles

Epochs do not change on a dime. Yes, the era of market extremism is waning, Republicans' ratings are plummeting, and, the polls agree, more of us believe that Elvis is hiding in the hills with the Shining Path than still have faith in American big business. But none of this means that the liberal era, or hour, is upon us. The liberal moment, perhaps. The all-but-unanimous congressional enactment of Paul Sarbanes' financial-reform bill was such a moment -- and how long has it been since American liberalism had one of those? But just one week later, the same discredited corporations that the Sarbanes bill took aim at still had enough clout to get a renewal of the president's fast-track authority through the very same Congress. Welcome to politics in a time of interregnum. Everything has changed and nothing has. The corporate and financial sectors, as they periodically do, have blown themselves up but, through the logic of capitalism and through simple inertia, they retain vast power...

Where in the annals of class conflict do we put the current tiff between America's investors and its CEOs? Up until a few weeks ago, this would have been considered a question not worthy of an answer. Both groups bobbed on the same tide. They felt the same exultation when their stock rose, the same apprehension when it fell. Magically, American capitalism had eliminated class conflict. Whether through their own initiative or their 401(k) plans, roughly half our compatriots were into the market, and all but the dimmest workers knew that wages were a sideshow, that portfolio value was the real stuff. As the bubble economy steadily inflated, the successful CEO not only eclipsed the leading figures in government, but government itself: D.C. dithered, CEOs delivered. Today the cult of the CEO has disbanded, but even so, the occasional criminality of the wayward CEO would not in itself have pushed investors to revolt. It took the stock option brouhaha to expose this fault line in...

Ask any liberal to identify the force in American politics most intent on destroying progressive prospects and causes and you're sure to hear that it's the Bush administration or the Republican right or some such reactionary power. Let me gently suggest, however, that a very different force has wormed its way onto this list, and may indeed be right at the top: the Green Party. There's something so very pure about the Greens' destructiveness. The Republican right, after all, isn't committed to stamping out liberalism purely as an end in itself; it is also a means to advance its own agenda of more power and wealth to the powerful and wealthy. When the Greens run a candidate against a Democrat, however, neither their campaign nor the effect of their campaign advances their agenda one whit. Their goal is simply to defeat Democrats, even the most liberal Democrats. Especially the most liberal Democrats. Consider the appalling farce now unfolding in Minnesota, where the Greens recently...

Few things in contemporary American politics have been more certain than the Senate's support for free trade. While the critics and criticisms of global laissez-faire have been growing in number and the House's support for free trade has become increasingly iffy, the Senate has rolled merrily along, Republicans and Democrats alike ratifying whatever trade bill was up for a vote. Imagine, then, the stunned bewilderment on Capitol Hill, at the White House, and among K Street's cadre of corporate lobbyists on the afternoon of Tuesday, May 14. The Senate had just refused to kill the Dayton-Craig amendment to the bill restoring the president's authority to negotiate fast-track (that is, unamendable by Congress) trade treaties. The amendment, by Minnesota Democrat Mark Dayton and Idaho Republican Larry Craig, struck at fast track's very heart. It gave the Senate the right to review, and reject, any language in a trade accord that weakened U.S. anti-dumping laws -- that is, statutes...

In Europe, the year 1968 has always meant only half of what it's meant here in the United States. On both sides of the Atlantic, 1968 was the year of the great youth uprising, of the emergence of a distinct New Left. The protesters who took to the streets from Chicago to Paris weren't simply opposing the war in Vietnam but the Cold War liberalism of their nations' parties of the center-left. And their goal wasn't simply to repudiate Cold War policies but to confront the New Deal-cum-social democratic politics of those parties with a host of new concerns: civil rights, individual liberties, feminism, environmentalism, and what might be termed lifestyle liberalism. But in the United States, 1968 has long had a different and far darker significance, even aside from the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy. It was also the year when the white backlash became a dominant force in American politics, when all the convulsions of the 1960s engendered a more-than-opposite...